The Blacksmith Café isn’t an ordinary coffee shop. One half is a café, the other half is a working forge. Nate and Jo Winkler opened the shop on Highway 160, where you can get espresso, locally sourced pastries and fresh yerba mate, and also catch live blacksmithing during open forging hours.
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Transcript
I always tell people hot steel is a lot like Play-Doh. However you hit it or if you smash it, it’s going to move in all directions. You start with a piece of steel or iron, heat that up in a forge, which is typically coal or propane, and you’re going to heat that up to a red to a yellow heat. The hotter you get it, the softer it gets. And then you’re going to use an anvil and a hammer, and you’re essentially creating a pinch point between the two to start to form that steel. It’s really about being able to control that in a quick way because you don’t have a lot of time.
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As a young kid, about nine years old, I actually made my first espresso shot. My parents owned a health food store and they put a little cafe in the front and my mom just kind of said, “Hey, can you figure out how to do this?” And then I also worked with my grandfather and my dad in a wood shop. They built custom cabinetry and furniture. I kind of went back to wanting to do something with my hands and I just bought an anvil, actually a piece of railroad track and built a forge out of a propane tank, started messing around in my garage, posted some stuff on Etsy, and then it started selling and made some more stuff. It started selling. A year later, I was making enough on Etsy to quit my job, do that full time. And then we moved out here and I built out a full shop and we were basically, that’s what I was doing, working from home out of my home shop and just fulfilling online orders. I decided it’d be cool to do a showroom for my hardware and try to get more local business, but I just didn’t want a cold, boring showroom. So I was like, how can I make this more fun, more interactive? And the idea of this kind of hybrid cafe, coffee shop with a blacksmith studio, it just kind of evolved.
When this building came up, it was actually kind of perfect because it was separated and he could go back to doing cafe, restaurant, food service stuff and still have his blacksmithing side and have the showroom.
Had one side for blacksmithing, one side for the cafe, so I just took out a HELOC on my house and decided to go for it.
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